


What Dark Dream

by philalethia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood and Gore, Dark Sherlock, Horror, M/M, Vampire Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 05:19:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8433316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philalethia/pseuds/philalethia
Summary: There were reasons humans didn't share flats with vampires. John thought the nightmares would be the problem. He was wrong.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I got sad that I wasn't doing anything fandom-y for Halloween. So I wrote something really quickly.
> 
> Warning: Beware of gore, sexualized violence, asphyxiation, and generally dark/gross subject matter. If you think any of that may be distressing or triggering, I strongly advise you not to read.

“Do you have to do that first thing in the morning?” John asked. He was stalled in the doorway, carrying his bathrobe and staring stupidly. “It’s…” He searched for the word. Creepy? Nauseating? “Off-putting,” he decided.

Sherlock, sitting straight-backed in his armchair, didn’t even glance at him. “Your typing method is off-putting as well.”

He lifted a fat, dead rat to his mouth and bit. If John could still identify the animal—brought upstairs by Mrs Hudson as a sort of snack, no doubt, similar to how she sometimes brought John a sandwich or a plate of biscuits in the afternoons—that meant he’d only just got started. In as little as ten minutes, the rat would be reduced to a gruesome lump of flesh and fur, the dozens of fang marks robbing it of any distinguishing features.

Sherlock pulled back, the whole lower half of his face smeared with blood. A single drop of the stuff dripped almost elegantly down his plump bottom lip to his chin when he continued, “But you don’t hear me complaining.”

His eyes were covered in a red film—opaque, completely obscuring his pupils and irises. If John were to press a finger to the corner of one eye, he knew it would come away bloody.

John snorted, glancing away. “Right. Only you complain all the fucking time, so that’s a load of bollocks.”

It was surprisingly easy to clutch his bathrobe more closely and keep walking. To pretend he was just a normal bloke on his way to have a shower while his flatmate ate breakfast in the living room. To behave as though it was simple crumbs he’d be cleaning up later, instead of tiny bits of fur and perhaps a tail.

He was through the kitchen, nearly to the door of the en suite, when Sherlock’s voice—unnaturally, inhumanly deep, throaty and gravelly in a way that made John brace himself for an attack—reached him.

“I really wouldn’t, if I were you.”

John’s heartbeat quickened to a patter, like a little rabbit’s in the path of a wolf. And after he’d spent so long upstairs trying to slow his pulse to its normal rhythm, to hide that he’d woken from an erotic dream—something involving a brick wall and a slick hole, but the rest of the details were gone—with his dick hard and his heart pounding.

There were reasons humans didn’t share flats with vampires—or spaces of any kind, for that matter. Vampires were erratic and inscrutable, constantly hungry, and easily tempted. When John had announced he was moving in with one, Harry had begged him not to and Ella had underlined “suicidal impulses” on her notepad and tried to discuss hospitalisation.

But, well. John never really claimed to be normal.

*

(“Flatmates should know the worst about each other,” Sherlock said, with a grin so forced, so wrong, that John had to hide a shiver.

“I thought he and Peter might be better suited,” Mike said quickly, as though John had missed his frantic attempts at making eye contact, his (badly) surreptitious gesturing, his mouthing of _not him, not him_.

By that point, though, John didn’t care about Peter at all. “Playing the violin and not talking are your worst qualities?” He couldn’t hold in a snort and a smirk.

To his surprise, Sherlock returned it. John suppressed another shiver. They were a bit uncanny valley, vampires were. There was something just a bit off about them—unless their fangs were out, anyway, and then there was something terribly off about them.

“Well, there’s also the obvious, of course,” Sherlock said. He strode towards them, and although Mike stumbled hastily away, John stayed where he was. He got a strong, dizzying whiff of cologne and copper as Sherlock squeezed past to grab his coat. “I tend to respond… poorly, shall we say, to activities that significantly alter the human heartbeat. Exercise, sexual activity, nightmares....”

He turned, his coat on, and wound a blue scarf round his popped collar while he considered John, sweeping his eerily unblinking gaze from John’s hair to his shoes. “Hmm. The nightmares might present a problem.”

_Jesus_ , John thought. Months of struggling to tell his therapist about the nightmares, to put into words the pain and death he saw when he closed his eyes at night, yet here was a vampire who had known just by looking at him. John shifted his weight from one foot to the other, gripping his walking stick.

“Well,” he found himself saying, “hopefully the flat’s worth it.”

Sherlock let out a bark of laughter, mostly drowning out Mike’s gasp of horror. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, grinning widely. His teeth, on full display, were perfectly straight and white and deceptively human. This time John couldn’t hide his shiver. “It is.”)

*

It echoed in John’s mind. Louder than the hum of the shower, the trickle of the water disappearing down the drain, the sound of soap lathering in his hands.

_‘I really wouldn’t, if I were you.’_

He’d never been good at doing what he was told. Not when it was his own safety at risk, in any case.

Something like ten minutes spent upstairs, lying motionless in bed under the covers, waiting for his erection to flag—all for nothing. He was just as hard now as when he’d woken up. In some ways, it was worse now. The groggy haze was gone, the need to piss was gone—and the shower was familiar wanking territory, the water was warm, and his hand was making slow passes down his chest, up his thighs, along his waist.

John looked down and all he could focus on was his cock, long and thick, the head peeking out of the foreskin.

_Just a touch_ , he thought. _Just one quick touch._

It wasn’t quick. He closed his hand around the base of his prick, giving it a gentle squeeze, and then he couldn’t resist the urge to stroke. _Just a little_ , he told himself, pumping once, tracing the most prominent vein with his thumb. He watched his fist nudge the foreskin over his cock head before drawing it back. He felt the sweet kiss of sensitivity when he was exposed. His eyes drifted shut, and his head dropped back. The water beat down on his crown and streamed down his nape to his back and his bum.

He did it again, then again, then a third time, and eventually a sixth. As long as he didn’t come, as long as he kept his movements slow and his pulse calm. He imagined Sherlock in his armchair, still smeared with blood and enjoying his rat, rolling his eyes as he listened to John in the shower, teasing himself whilst dying for a proper wank. Sherlock could probably hear everything: John’s legs trembling with need, John’s front teeth sinking into his bottom lip, John’s palm gliding up and down his wet cock.

John opened his eyes, stilling his hand. His prick was red, swollen with blood, throbbing in time with his pulse.

_‘I really wouldn’t, if I were you.’_

With a shaky sigh, he made himself let go. His cock neglected and aching, John finished his shower and allowed his breathing to even out, his heartbeat to slow back to its normal resting pace. He dried himself, put on his bathrobe, and opened the door.

Sherlock stood on the other side, alarmingly close. One hand was lifted, his head bowed. About to open the door himself, struggling to resist the part of himself that demanded he do so? Fear flooded John’s veins like a spill of kerosene. Just a single spark would light him up in flames.

Sherlock stared down at him, his red eyes unblinking. Blood stained his face from cheekbone to cheekbone and all the way down his neck, mostly dried now aside from a clotty patch on his chin. His hand, also smeared with dried blood, hadn’t dropped. It hovered, red-streaked palm out, near enough that it almost rested on John’s chest, just below his sternum. With so little effort, he could plunge his hand into John’s skin, twist upwards, and close his fingers around John’s beating heart.

It took all of John’s strength to remain perfectly, safely still.

Sherlock’s head cocked. _Say something_ , he seemed to say.

John licked his lips. “S-sorry.”

Silence was Sherlock’s response. Then, without a word, he turned and retreated to his bedroom, shutting the door firmly behind him.

John didn’t see him again for the rest of the day.

*

(It was so easy to forget. In the exhilaration of the chase through London, John forgot that it was anything more than Sherlock’s damnably long legs that made him so bloody fast, impossible to keep up with. John forgot a lot of things, really—everything but the whip of the wind in his face, the burn in his legs, and how his heart pounded in his ears as loud as a series of gunshots.

When they returned to Baker Street, he thought nothing of collapsing against the wall beside Sherlock, gasping and laughing. It didn’t occur to him that he shouldn’t have leaned towards his new flatmate, just a bit, gazing up at him and trying to share the thrill and the absurdity and the joy of being _alive._

Then he saw that Sherlock wasn’t breathing harshly like John was, wasn’t breathing at all in fact. He saw that Sherlock’s delighted grin was falling from his lips and he was staring at John’s throat, John’s pulse point, with an awful, chilling intensity. John swallowed, and Sherlock’s eyes followed the movement of his throat keenly.

_Oh_ , John thought. _Fuck._ His laughter died, but his breathing couldn’t; his heartbeat couldn’t.

Sherlock’s nostrils flared. His pupils had narrowed to little more than black pinpricks.

To back away would have been suicide. A vampire would perceive it as a retreat, an intent to struggle. Sherlock would have given chase. John would have been pinned to the wall, bleeding out into Sherlock’s mouth, before he could even shout.

“You should really keep your distance,” Sherlock said. John could feel the rumble of his voice, unnaturally deep, in his own gut. “If we were alone....”

_We are alone_ , John thought.

But then Mrs Hudson was rushing out, announcing that they weren’t, and the moment—Sherlock’s hungry stare—was broken. They moved on.)

*

John was dreaming again. Just like the night before, it was something about sex—something dripping wet, something involving teeth—and he was jolted awake seconds before he came. He thrust his hips, chasing the fleeting sensation, and then he felt the weight on him. Strong hands on his wrists, knobby knees on his thighs, pinning him to the bed.

Instinctively, John tried to buck but only succeeded in disturbing the weight slightly, jostling one knee and making it slide between John’s thighs.

“Stop,” John heard. “Just— _stop_.”

The voice and the tone were familiar, even if the words themselves took a moment to process. It was Sherlock, panicked and pleading. John stopped immediately, going limp just as Sherlock bore down harder. John cried out, both from the sudden ache in his wrists and the pressure against his cock, which was still hard, still throbbing and needy.

“ _John_ ,” Sherlock said.

There was a sharp pain in John’s neck. For a moment he was sure he felt Sherlock’s fangs tearing into him—his jugular ripped from his throat, and blood gushing out in great waves, soaking the sheets beneath him—his body bleeding out right here in the nearly pitch-black bedroom.

Then the moment passed, and he realised it was only Sherlock’s hands clamped across his throat, a fingernail nicking the skin. John’s back was fighting to arch; his hands were free; his dick was pressed so firmly to Sherlock’s flexed thigh that a moan rose from his chest.

“Don’t,” Sherlock said, “move.” His teeth were gritted, his voice pitched lower than normal.

John couldn’t help it. He twitched, frotting weakly against Sherlock’s leg. His cock gave a sweet, pitiful pulse and nearly spilled in his pants.

Sherlock’s hands clamped down harder, blocking John’s windpipe entirely.

Trying to slow his breathing, slow his heartbeat, John thought, but his fight-or-flight kicked in and drove him higher. He was so close. His orgasm was _right there_ , tasting like cologne and copper and teasing him with its teeth. His pulse throbbed in his ears; his lungs burned.

A lock of hair tickled his nose, and suddenly there was something wet against his throat. Sherlock’s tongue, skimming the skin. John realised his hands were where Sherlock had left them, motionless on the bed. He tried to move them, but his fingers didn’t so much as twitch. His vision flickered—little flashes of light in the dark room.

_Oh god_ , he thought, _I’m going to die_. He swore he could feel warm sand beneath him, grains of it clogging his throat and stinging his eyes. A memory of the hot Afghanistan sun beat down on him like a war drum.

“Stop struggling,” Sherlock said. His voice was little more than a growl now: inhuman and predatory. Dangerous.

Although his instincts screamed in protest, John let himself go limp and powerless. Calmness settled over him, as quiet and inevitable as the night time after a long day.

As his heart stuttered and slowed, Sherlock’s grip finally relented, allowing John a heaving, desperate breath. His cock had long since gone soft, incapable now of so much as a twitch, but still that first gulp of air was so good he thought he might come from it.

_And you worried the nightmares would be the problem_ , he thought, half-delirious.

Well. John never really claimed to be normal, did he?

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween!


End file.
